iPhone RAM

Is Apple Ripping You Off With The iPhone 4S?

Instead of just building a giant door, Apple's building a door big enough to accommodate its slimmed iOS 5 physique.

Apple’s always been chided as selling the same thing (or less) for more money. Recent years have seen that criticism fade, but the latest news that the iPhone 4S has only 512 MB RAM puts this old mantra back in the spotlight. Recent Android devices all have 1GB of RAM, so many iPhone 4S owners are wondering, “What gives, Apple?”

Before you head to the streets with torch in hand, let’s look at what RAM (memory) actually affects. The first is multitasking. RAM gives you more space for apps to run without having to do OS-level tricks like slowly swapping out RAM to the flash storage. Android is a lot like Windows on a PC: It doesn’t really know what it’s going to be run on, so it’s not tuned for a small set of hardware. Throwing RAM at the devices is a way of making sure apps and the OS aren’t resource-starved, making multitasking suck. Apple’s able to optimize iOS in ways that Google and others just can’t, so the multitasking won’t suffer from this. Instead of just building a giant door, Apple’s building a door big enough to accommodate its slimmed iOS 5 physique.

One of the few things that RAM actually affects is games. Apple’s become a force in mobile gaming, and the improved graphics chip and CPU in the iPhone 4S is more than enough to give developers what’s needed to make the next iterations of 3D games like Infinity Blade for a while to come.

In that arena, consistency has its advantages. The 512 MB of RAM in the iPhone 4S is the same amount as in the iPad 2. Apple is being careful not to fragment the hardware in order to make things more consistent for game developers and users. If there isn’t a noticeable gain for users and it costs battery life, then it’s on the chopping block — this trend of matching each generation of iPad and iPhone’s hardware will likely be its modus operandi for a long time to come.

So it seems Apple’s selling less for more in this case, but will you notice? Not unless you have X-ray vision.